Open access press vs traditional university presses on Amazon

Open access press vs traditional university presses on Amazon Rory McGreal (PhD),* Edward Acqua** * Professor & Assoc. VP, Research at Athabasca University. ** Analyst, Institutional Studies section of Advancement, Athabasca University. Abstract This study is a comparison AU Press with three other traditional (non-open access) Canadian university presses. The analysis is based on actual physical book sales on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca. Statistical methods include the sampling of the sales ranking of randomly selected books from each press. Results suggest that there is no significant difference in the ranking of printed books sold by AU Press in comparison with traditional university presses. However, AU Press, can demonstrate a significantly larger readership for its books as evidenced by thousands of downloads of the open electronic versions. Keywords open educational resources, open access, press, Amazon, ranking Recommended citation: McGreal, R.; Acqua, E. (2010). Open access press vs traditional university presses on Amazon. In Open ED 2010 Proceedings. Barcelona: UOC, OU, BYU. [Accessed: dd/mm/yy].< http://hdl.handle.net/10609/5082> 1

AU Press is Canada s first open access university press. This study is a comparison of AU Press with four other traditional Canadian university presses, which do not support open access at this time. The analysis is based on actual physical book sales on the largest online book retailer: Amazon.com and the Canadian version: Amazon.ca. Statistical methods are used to determine whether or not the traditional presses show higher sales. This includes the sampling of the sales ranking of ten randomly selected recently released books from each press. Results show that there is no significant difference in the number of printed books sold suggesting that releasing academic books on open access does not lessen physical book sales online in comparison with traditional university presses using Amazon as a measure. However, AU Press, because it is open access and publicly available at no cost, can boast of having a significantly larger readership for its books. The traditional university presses, because of their cost, print-only format, and other proprietary limitations are not readily available and therefore not accessible to potential readers. Amazon Sales Ranking The Amazon sales ranking number is provided as a service for authors and publishers, but can also be one useful gauge of the number of printed books purchased. The ranking provides a relative measure that is useful for assessing a book s sales performance on Amazon. The lower tranking number of a particular book can be interpreted as signifying higher sales. Two rankings were studied, based on both Amazon.com and Amazon.ca sales, which are updated each hour to reflect recent and historical sales of every book sold on the respective web sites. Significantly, this rating does not apply to Kindle books that have been increasing rapidly in sales volume (Rosenthal, 2010). For competitive reasons, Amazon does not release actual sales information to the public, so very few, if any people outside of Amazon know the actual sales numbers (Amazon, 2010). However, Rampant Tech Press (n.d.) and Sampson (2010) have independently ventured to extrapolate the sales to a ranking order and have come up with similar information displayed on Figure 1. Rosenthal (2010) provides similar estimates, noting that the lower ranking books (those with a higher ranking number, >#100 000) move comparatively little in their ranking as opposed to rather erratic movements in the best sellers (<#10,000). He notes that weak sellers decay relatively slowly. He observes that a title must sell at least one copy a year to remain above a rank of two million. As most academic books never reach these high rankings; they are with few exceptions to be considered weak sellers (>#100,000) Sampson (2010) notes that the Amazon rankings provide only marginal sales data that are rough estimates at best. On the other hand he claims that the relative sales ranking can be useful for comparisons among books. Books with rankings between #10,000 and #100,000 are recalculated once a day; historic sales information plays a key role in these calculations. However, with books ranking higher than #100,000, which are also recalculated every day, history takes a back seat. Methodology Stratified sampling is a common probability method that is considered to be better than random sampling because the stratification reduces sampling error. The relevant stratum in this case was a subgroup of books published between 2008 and 2010. This was necessary because the targeted 2

population consisted of AU Press books. As AU Press is new, it only had published books in those years. Random sampling was then used to select a reasonable number of samples (n=12) from each publisher. This provided the researchers with confidence that the stratum represented each population well and accurately represented the overall publications in the years under investigation. Limiting the other presses to a subgroup made up of the most recent books published ensured a fair comparison with the new AU Press. The sampled publications were then investigated to determine their ranking order on both Amazon.com and Amazon.ca. It was considered appropriate to investigate both stores as it was expected that Canadian scholarly publications would be relatively better sellers in Canada than internationally. The survey was also conducted on two dates separated by three months and the results have been averaged. Both Rosenthal (2010) and Sampson (2010) recommend this to get a more trustworthy ranking numbers as the numbers can be skewed drastically if measured on any one occasion. The investigation AU Press was compared with three of the major university presses in Canada, namely the Toronto Press (UTP), the Calgary Press (UCP), and the Alberta Press (UAP). The Amazon.com and Amazon.ca ranking results for these four university presses are available in Figures 2 and 3. The investigation aimed to determine whether or not there was a ranking difference between the average ranking of the books in the open press and any or all of ranking averages of the traditional presses. AU Press which is the open university press was compared to the following traditional presses: Toronto Press, Calgary Press and Alberta Press in terms of sales ranking of these presses from Amazon (Amazon.ca & Amazon.com). First AU Press was compared to each of the traditional presses, and secondly it was compared to the three as a group using their ranking data from Amazon. The Null Hypothesis was posited, stating that there would be no difference between the open press and the traditional presses using the mean sales rank (open press) = mean sales rank (traditional press) was tested at the 5% level of significance against The Alternative Hypothesis: that there is a difference, that is, the mean sales rank (open press) is not equal to the mean sales rank (traditional press). The results are summarized in Figures 4 and 5. The t-statistics were computed and compared to the critical t-statistics of a two-tailed test. In all these cases, the null hypothesis could not be rejected at the 5% level of significance. The conclusion is that there seems to be no difference between the open press and the traditional press. The tests were however not statistically significant (p>0.05), indicating that the results might have happened by chance. On the other hand, the open access books published by AU Press have been downloaded, on average, thousands of times by scholars and other users all over the world and particularly by those in developing countries. In the six months prior to this survey first being conducted, the average total downloads per full book was over 800 and more than 2000 if chapter downloads are included. The median download rate for full books was more than 250 and the total downloads median with 3

chapters was nearly 1000. Some of the more popular scholarly books had more than 2000 full book downloads and over 6 000 chapter and book downloads. See Figure 6. AU Press books and chapters have been downloaded by scholars and other users all over the world. In more than sixty different countries. As expected the largest number of downloaders (more than 50%) are from Canada and the United States, but more than 33% of the other downloaders were from developing countries Others were from the emerging countries of Eastern Europe. Several books have also won distinguished international academic awards and have been reviewed and cited in leading scholarly journals. This paper demonstrates that at least in the measure of physical book sales, there is no evidence that creating OERs for scholarly books decreases print book sales. There is no significant difference between the sale of printed books by traditional university presses when compared with an open access press, namely AU Press using the Amazon measures. There is however the added advantage of substantially increasing readership, especially in developing countries of scholarly books that are made available on line as OERs. 4

Figures Rank # Rampant Press Copies Sold/day Sampson copies per week > #1 3000 > 1,000 copies per week > #10 650 200 1,000 copies per week > #100 100 200 copies per week 100 > #1000 13 10 100 copies per week > #10,000 2.2 (11 copies every 5 days) 1 10 copies per week > #100,000 0.2 (1 copy every 5 days) < 200 sold > #1,000,000 0.006 (3 copies every 500 days) < 40 books sold > #2,000,000 0.0001 (1 copy every 1000 days) 1 book ordered Figure 1 - Rank Number relation to sales (Rampant Tech Press, n. d.; Sampson, 2010) Athabasca University Press Toronto Press Calgary Press Alberta Press Controlled Group Press 57,105 227,397 422,660 154,521 268,193 198,141 119,746 111,002 355,812 195,520 239,621 46,419 396,751 424,099 289,090 98,969 56,934 561,944 246,631 288,503 101,707 201,532 683,365 169,208 351,368 225,921 227,397 1,195,769 65,710 496,292 145,839 249,305 237,886 60,384 182,525 488,360 477,072 421,807 83,253 327,377 80,031 283,831 270,707 91,869 215,469 408,713 419,100 388,270 267,048 358,139 122,315 332,398 787,757 197,166 439,107 Figure 2 - Rankings from Amazon.ca January 2010 5

Athabasca University Press Toronto Press Calgary Press Alberta Press Controlled Group Press 1,260,279 2,393,121 3,124,635 1,290,317 2,269,358 705,438 3,337,710 160,272 3,428,847 2,308,943 1,062,251 1,190,429 1,048,357 4,068,647 2,102,478 1,765,283 735,372 1,797,624 776,928 1,103,308 2,940,755 2,992,991 647,557 1,365,207 1,668,585 4,472,042 2,393,121 3,076,338 999,705 2,156,388 1,086,172 1,483,875 724,521 334,671 847,689 1,712,101 2,376,571 4,938,289 2,865,188 3,393,349 2,637,674 2,248,576 4,312,491 4,205,723 3,588,930 2,087,648 618,051 3,634,196 8,581,611 4,277,953 1,068,800 1,654,718 2,006,625 3,419,384 2,360,242 Figure 3 - Rankings from Amazon.com January 2010 Description AUCA GROUPS.CA Mean 196974.7 296647 Variance 1.93E+10 1.1E+10 Observations 11 12 Hypothesized Mean Difference 0 df 19 t Stat -1.93098 P(T<=t) one-tail 0.034272 t Critical one-tail 1.729133 P(T<=t) two-tail 0.068545 t Critical two-tail 2.093024 Since the t-calculated (-1.93098) lies within the acceptance interval (±2.093024) for a two-tailed test, we are unable to reject the null hypothesis that there is no difference between AU Press at amazon.ca and The Three Groups Press at amazon.ca. The test is however not statistically significant (p>0.05) Figure 4 - Athabasca University at amazon.ca & The Group of Universities at amazon.ca 6

Description AUCOM GROUPS.COM Mean 1890767.55 2370656.61 Variance 1.2222E+12 1.0718E+12 Observations 11 11 Hypothesized Mean Difference 0 df 20 t Stat -1.0508471 P(T<=t) one-tail 0.15293058 t Critical one-tail 1.72471822 P(T<=t) two-tail 0.30586116 t Critical two-tail 2.08596344 Since the t-calculated (-1.0508471) lies within the acceptance interval (±2.08596344) for a twotailed test, we are unable to reject the null hypothesis that there is no difference between AU Press at amazon.com and The Three Groups Press at amazon.com. The test is however not statistically significant (p>0.05) Figure 5 - Athabasca University at amazon.com & The 3 Groups at amazon.com BOOKS Aug'09 Sep'09 Oct'09 Nov'09 Dec'09 Jan'10 A 98 105 166 193 117 119 B 73 55 75 51 86 76 C 93 90 141 114 75 94 D 34 19 60 46 32 32 E 832 1439 1326 1158 818 1335 F 67 23 78 44 12 17 G 68 43 135 205 100 140 H 897 1090 1960 1642 1447 1447 I 144 137 220 219 161 92 J 93 110 134 166 113 90 K 182 127 249 160 267 124 L 36 218 306 261 186 215 M 0 606 506 299 209 255 Figure 6 - Monthly Book Downloads at AU Press 7

Bibliographic references Amazon.com. (n. d.). What sales rank means. Retrieved from: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeid=525376 Rampant Tech Press (n. d.). Inside the Amazon sales rank. Retrieved from: http://www.rampantbooks.com/mgt_amazon_sales_rank.htm Rosenthal, Morris (2010). Amazon sales rank for books: Graph explains what Amazon sales ranks mean. Retrieved from: http://www.fonerbooks.com/surfing.htm Sampson, Brent. (2010). Navigating the Amazon sales ranking. Retrieved from: http://ezinearticles.com/?navigating-the-amazon-sales-ranking&id=41607 About the authors Rory McGreal, PhD Professor & Assoc. VP, Research at Athabasca University. Professor Rory McGreal is the Associate VP Research at AU. He has been nominated by Canada for a UNESCO Chair in OER. He was previously Director of TeleEducation NB and a supervisor at Contact North. He has worked in the Middle East, Seychelles and Europe. He has been honored with the Wedemeyer Award for Distance Education practitioner. Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute Athabasca University 1 University Drive Athabasca AB T9S 3A3 CANADA rory@athabascau.ca Edward Acqua Analyst, Institutional Studies section of Advancement, Athabasca University. Dr. Edward Acqua is an analyst in the Institutional Studies section of Advancement at Athabasca University Canada s Open University based in Alberta, Canada. He is responsible for analyzing data related to university initiatives. Institutional Studies Athabasca University 1 University Drive Athabasca AB T9S 3A3 CANADA edwarda@athabascau.ca 8

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